It’s time for our fourth installment of “5 Things That Don’t Work for Your Fitness Plan.” This month, we’ll talk about infomercial gimmicks.

The television is a powerful tool in the marketer’s arsenal, especially at 2:30 in the morning when you are sleep-deprived. Infomercials boast of unreal physique transformations in only 30 days using the next greatest invention in the fitness industry. You only need to exercise 15 minutes twice a week and you will see your abs in no time, but you must use their new tool. Nothing else will work! It has to be the AbWheelCrunchmaster 6000 SUX.

Really?

Let’s look at this for a minute, the infomercials show you before and after photos of people who were fat and out of shape in the “before” section. In the “after” section it doesn’t even look like the same person. The transformation is so remarkable that you feel the urge to buy the product right away. That’s exactly what a marketing specialist’s job is, to create urgency and get you to buy. They include bonus offers that you receive if you order now, and they inflate the value of the product with special diet plans, vegetable choppers and magic cloths that soak up 400% of their weight in liquid. They’ve got you hooked.

There are a few things that they don’t tell you. For one, the people that made the huge changes didn’t just use the AbWheelCrunchmaster 6000 SUX. They all did a rigorous exercise program and followed a strict diet. It was not the use of the magic product that caused the changes. It was sewing someone’s mouth shut so they couldn’t eat crap all day, and supervising an arduous exercise program for them to follow. Sure they may have used the AbWheelCrunchmaster 6000 SUX, but they also lifted weights, did conditioning, and followed a low-calorie diet. That is what caused the changes.

Another trick they use is to use one of two types of people: those that have never exercised and athletes who are out of shape. This is sheer brilliance. When you take someone who has never exercised and put them on a strict program, they make progress, FAST. When you take a former athlete who is grossly out of shape and do the same, they respond very fast, too. You never see someone who is in decent shape to begin with use the product. Why? Because there will be negligible results and they know this.

Let’s examine the training end of the equation now: most of these products are designed to make basic exercises easier. They take a fat guy and show him doing crunches and rolling around on the floor looking like a fish out of water. They make reference to all the pain you get from exercise and how it is just too inconvenient to get on the floor. Really? Using a piece of $90.00 plastic that has a few rubber bands and was made in China that allow you to do a crunch while sitting in your recliner is going to get you abs? Sorry, it’s not. Losing body fat is the only way to make your abs more visible. Believe me, they are there. They are just covered with body fat. To make them visible, you must eat less calories than you burn, and you must exercise to make the muscles “pop.”

Here is more fuel to the debunking fire: none of these gimmicks work large areas of muscle. They focus on the arms, or the belly. Training small areas of muscle will not get the job done. Shaking a plastic toy in a suggestive manner 400 times a minute will not make you lose weight. You must move your entire body and stimulate large amounts of muscle. You do not need to squat 800 pounds or bench 500 pounds but you must do full-body training. Spot-reduction is a myth, as is spot-growth. You just can’t lose fat in one area or make only one muscle group bigger. This has been proven so many times in real research that I won’t even discuss it further. Trust me, it’s true.

Profit is the name of the game. They are trying to sell a product that is made as cheaply as possible at the highest price so that they can to make money. And make money they do. Lots of it. They find your “pain” and prey on it. Your “pain” is something that eludes you or is something that makes you uncomfortable or insecure. It can be an upcoming vacation where you want to look great, fitting into clothes that you have outgrown, looking better to the opposite sex, and many more. The marketers do targeted research before they film the infomercials and figure out who they are trying to get suckered in and what their “pain” is. Once they know this, you are fair game. Your money is gone.

You would be much better served watching some YouTube videos for free from quality sources, like TPS, EliteFTS, IKFF, and many more. Then, follow the exercises that you saw for free. A better choice is to use the $99.00 that you would have spent on the AbWheelCrunchmaster 6000 SUX and getting a few sessions with a good trainer to teach you how to squat, do pushups, and perform a few other exercises the right way. Now you’ve made an investment in education that will last a lifetime instead of blowing money on a plastic toy from China that does nothing.